RE: Does Mathematica do transparent colors?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg31323] RE: [mg31318] Does Mathematica do transparent colors?
- From: "David Park" <djmp at earthlink.net>
- Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2001 03:07:03 -0500 (EST)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Ron, Mathematica has no direct way to make transparent or translucent colors. In your case, this may be a blessing. Carl Bergstrom introduced me to an excellent book: "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Edward R. Tufte. One of the principles is maximizing the data ink and minimizing ink that does not actually contain information. Having colored bars AND a colored filled plot might actually be confusing. Which is more important: the actual data values, or the fact that they closely follow a normal distribution? In the first case you could used a regular bar chart and draw a normal unfilled distribution curve over it, perhaps using a gray line. In the second case, you could draw a filled normal distribution and represent the data by plot points or plot symbols. Another possibility (not as good in my opinion) is to use a filled normal curve and use rectangular outlines instead of filled bars. In any case, I think you could achive an effective display without the use of translucent colors. David Park djmp at earthlink.net http://home.earthlink.net/~djmp/ > From: Ronald Bruck [mailto:bruck at math.usc.edu] To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net > > Subject says it all. I'd like to have translucent colors, so that I > can see one object underneath another. Is there any way to do this in > Mathematica? > > For example, I'd like to plot a bar chart of e.g. a binomial > distribution and overlay it with a filled plot of the corresponding > normal distribution--but still be able to see the bars, underneath. > > --Ron Bruck >